New DOD Suicide Report Falls Short in Key Areas

A new Congressionally mandated Pentagon study of military suicide rates broken down by career field offers a rare look at comparative risk factors facing service members, but may raise more questions than it answers.

“This data is a good starting point that will now help members of Congress and their staff create more specific questions,” said Katherine Kuzminski, Deputy Director of Studies and the Director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C.

“To an extent, you do have to get your arms around how big this problem is,” she told Air & Space Forces Magazine. But “now we have that, so how do we get more granular, more detailed in our requests?”

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Kuzminski said the new report does not provide sufficient context. “If there’s 36 Special Forces deaths by suicide, is that 36 out of 40, or is that 36 out of 10,000?” she asked. “The way it’s lumped together, it’s difficult to get a sense of what [the data] truly means.”

Unlike the 2010 study, the report also does not distinguish among similar career fields in different services, such as Army and Marine Corps infantry or Navy and Air Force tactical aircraft maintainers. Not doing so makes it impossible to see whether rates vary by service, which could lead to better understanding.

“That’s why it really matters how the law is written,” Kuzminski said. “They didn’t ask for it by service, so it wasn’t presented by service.”

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The NDAA specified for the Pentagon to provide an interim briefing with preliminary findings by June, 2023, which might have presented the DOD a chance to review its limitations with Congress, but the report did not mention if such a briefing ever occurred.

In the future, Kuzminski said the individual services may be better positioned first to provide the kind of data that would generate more useful insights, and then to implement any new policy.

“It may actually be more effective, granular, and nuanced if the responsibility was to each of the services as opposed to DoD,” she said. “We need the data to know what the trends are, but in order to take action, that’s going to be at the service level.”

Read the full story from Air & Space Forces Magazine.